Six settings on a Google Business Profile make nearly all the difference: the primary category, the service area, the secondary categories, the attributes, special hours, and messaging. The first three decide which searches you appear on; the other three decide whether the customer contacts you once they have found you. Allow thirty minutes to go through all six, and expect visible effects within two to four weeks.
This piece does not cover creating a profile or optimising it in general: that is the subject of our full guide. It deals only with the settings we find badly configured one time out of two, including on profiles that are otherwise well kept.
The primary category: the heaviest setting of all
This is the field that weighs most on your local visibility, and it is almost always the one filled in once, at creation, and never revisited. It tells Google which kind of results you are allowed to appear in. A cabinetmaker filed under carpenter does not show up on the same searches, even though the two trades look alike on site.
The method: search Google for what your customers type to find somebody like you, then look at the category displayed on the three profiles at the top. Take the same one. If your current category differs, you have just found out why you are not appearing. One warning: changing the primary category on an established profile produces a few weeks of instability, so be sure before you do it.
Secondary categories, without stacking them
They exist to cover your other real services. The temptation is to add a dozen and cast a wide net; it backfires. A profile declaring itself general contractor, roofer, plumber and landscaper all at once sends a confused signal, and Google tends to treat it as less relevant on each of those searches.
Two to four secondary categories, matching services you genuinely provide and that make money, beat ten opportunistic claims. The sorting rule is simple: if you do not want calls for that service, do not add the category.
Service area or address: the choice that changes everything
Two situations, and you have to pick the right one. If customers come to you — showroom, workshop, shop — the address should be public. If you travel to them and work out of premises nobody visits, hide the address and declare a service area. A residential address shown on a profile is both a suspension risk and a signal of a very small operation.
On the area itself, declare what you actually cover, not what you would like to cover. An inflated area does not make you appear everywhere — proximity remains a ranking factor you do not get around by ticking towns — and it earns you out-of-territory requests. The full mechanism is explained in our piece on local search.
Widening your area does not make you appear further away. It only makes the phone ring for jobs you will turn down.
Attributes, the part nobody ever fills in
These are the small mentions displayed on the profile: free estimates, by appointment, women-owned, parking, accessibility, payment methods. They look trivial and they are not, for two reasons. Some act as filters in searches, which makes you appear in or disappear from a list. And above all, they answer the customer's objections before the call.
Free estimates is the most useful attribute in construction and home services: it is exactly the question running through the mind of someone hesitating to dial your number. Available attributes vary by category — one more reason to check the primary category first.
Special hours and messaging
Special hours cover public holidays and seasonal closures. Filling them in ahead avoids the worst scenario for a local profile: somebody drives over or calls during an unannounced closure and leaves a bad review that has nothing to do with your work. Ten minutes at the start of the year covers the holidays for twelve months.
Messaging comes down to one decision: turn it on only if somebody reads the messages every day. A message left unanswered for two days is worth less than messaging switched off, because the delay is visible to the visitor. The same principle applies across all your channels: response time is what decides, not the number of front doors.
What counts even more than the settings
A perfectly configured profile with no activity loses to an average but living one. Three things keep that activity up: photos added regularly, recent reviews, and replies to reviews. Review volume and recency remain one of the few levers that improve your visibility and your conversion rate at the same time, with no ad budget — including when a bad review lands.
For construction contractors, the profile is the first of three levers to put in place, before the website and before advertising: the full order is in our marketing plan for a construction company.
The profile sits inside a wider set of local visibility work, described on the SEO and GEO page — or in thirty minutes on a diagnostic call, during which we open your profile together.
The profile is the first project for a service business outside central Montreal — see Laval, Longueuil and the South Shore.